IntechOpen Author, Gérard Mourou, Wins Nobel Prize

All IntechOpen’s authors are exceptional scientists and researchers who work to improve the world around us. This year, one of their authors has been significantly recognized for his work and achievements in the field of physics, Gérard Mourou.

Together with a Canadian physicist Donna Strickland and an American physicist Arthur Ashkin, he’s received the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics. The prize was awarded for the invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA), which is a method of pulses of laser light of high power and short duration.

About Gérard Mourou

Born in France, Gérard studied physics at the University of Grenoble and earned his doctorate at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

He is a professor and a member of the Haut Collége at the ÉcolePolytechnique. In 1977, he became a professor at the University of Rochester where he and Donna Strickland produced their Nobel winning work in the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

In 1990, Mourou became the founding director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan.

Between 2005 and 2008, he was a director of the Laboratory of Applied Optics at the ÉcolePolytechnique and he managed to advance laser science in Europe by proposing Extreme Light Infrastructure.

In 2015, Gérard Mourou went to Bucharest for the Third Christmas Lecture where he presented “Breaking Through the Unknown: Extreme Light, Science to Art”.

As an author at IntechOpen, Mourou contributed a chapter to “Second Harmonic Generation Under Strong Influence of Dispersion and Cubic Nonlinearity Effects”.

Gérard’s Work and Achievements

By stretching laser pulses in time to reduce their peak power, then amplifying them and compressing them, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland have created ultrashort high-intensity laser pulses that don’t destroy the amplifying material.

This work allows for extremely precise cuts to be made, and the technique is already being used for corrective laser eye surgeries. It’s useful in scienceand medicine, and it is expected to also have a major impact on cancer therapy and other physics research in the future.

Throughout his career, Gérard Mourou has received many awards for his research and work. Besides the Nobel prize, in 1995, he’s received the R. W. Wood Prize by the OSA, and in 1997 the SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award.